TiltLab · Machine 12 · On the floor
PICK OF THE PATCH
Seven has a little red wagon and a whole pumpkin patch to fill it from. Every good shot puts another pumpkin on the pile. The pile gets taller, the wagon gets heavier, and the lane to the barn has a stone in it.
The idea
What if every shot put another pumpkin in the wagon?
In the Carve Night story trailer, Rosie takes Rin out to a farm pumpkin patch and tells her where pumpkins come from and why people carve them. This machine stands at the gate of that patch, on a late October evening.
Behind the glass, Seven works the rows. He rolls down the lane on his treads with his drone over his shoulder, and he pulls a little red wagon. The table is how he fills it. A ripe pumpkin, a row picked, a jackpot, a prize Big Max: each one flies into the wagon and finds a place on the pile.
The load is the score. The heavier the wagon, the more every shot is worth. Between balls the camera goes out to Seven to count the load with him. When the last ball drains, the camera goes out one more time, and you watch the wagon hit the stone.
The rows
Nine rows, and the sun goes down on the way.
Each row picked moves Seven further down the lane, and the evening moves with him: golden hour at the gate, sunset on the hayride, the string lights at night by the barn scale.
| Row | What grows there | Its trouble |
|---|---|---|
| 1. The Front Row | Howdens, the classic carving pumpkin | Wind. Gusts lean the table and blow leaves onto three heaps that slow the ball. The Fence Line rakes them. |
| 2. The Vine Rows | Sugar Pies, small and sweet | A gopher. His hole in the middle opens now and then. A ball that rolls near it is held, then thrown back up the table. |
| 3. The White Rows | Luminas | Farm gates across both ramps. Two hits open one, and that ramp counts three times after. |
| 4. The Hill | Knuckleheads, warts and all | Pumpkins come loose up the hill. A line down the middle is the warning; a ball in the way gets knocked. |
| 5. The Prize Pumpkin | A Big Max the size of Seven | Roll it to the wagon with hits on the middle track. Gates drop over the ramps, and halfway the gopher comes back for the ball. |
| 6. The Corn Maze | Cinderellas, in the middle of the maze | The sign shows the turns: three, then three more, then four. Shoot them in order. A wrong turn costs time. |
| 7. The Hayride | Jarrahdales, blue-grey, from Australia | A multiball on the back of the hay wagon. Every jackpot adds to the pile. |
| 8. The Lantern Walk | Cinderellas for carving | Six jack-o'-lanterns on the bales, one shot each. Bats swoop across the table at dusk. |
| 9. The Great Haul | Everything | The whole wagon to the barn scale. Shots put more on the pile and pass three checkpoints, then the Barn weighs it in. After that the day starts again at the gate, worth twice as much, and the wagon stays full. |
On the playfield
Every part, and what it does.
| Part | On the map | What it does | Points |
|---|---|---|---|
| The patch map | Painted on boards | The farm stand's own map, painted by hand on weathered planks: the dirt lane, the rows of vines, the gopher's hole, the leaf heaps and little sign boards for the shots. | – |
| The Scarecrow | The middle | Fills the row. The crows land on the track across it: shoo one to slow them down. In the fifth row the Big Max sits there. | 4,000 · shoo 30,000 |
| The Lane | The left orbit | Lets the harvest moon in when it is full. A windmill on its rail spins as the ball goes by. | 6,000 · moon 250,000 and up |
| The Hay Loop | The loop ramp | The biggest fill for the row. | 20,000 |
| The Silo Chute | The right ramp | With a lock lit it turns off into the Barn. | 12,000 |
| The Barn | The scoop | Locks, the way on to the next row, and the end of every mode. A ball put away here brings out a farm tool that changes the rules: the work gloves, the pruning shears, the farmer's almanac, the barn lantern, the thermos. | 7,500 · locked 50,000 |
| The Fence Line | The right alley | All the way round and down the right wall. Rakes the leaves off the table. | 8,000 · raked 20,000 and up |
| The pumpkins | The bumpers | Three pumpkins that glow when they are hit. | 1,000 |
| P-I-C-K | The top lanes | The flippers move the lit lanes. All four raise the bonus multiplier and light the helping hands (kickbacks) in both outlanes. | 2,500 · all 15,000 |
| H-A-Y | Three bales | Drop targets in front of the Barn. Knock down all three to light a lock. Two balls in the barn and a third start the Harvest Rush. | 3,000 · all 15,000 |
| The ripe one | A lit pumpkin | One shot at a time carries a ripe pumpkin for fourteen seconds. Make it and that pumpkin goes in the wagon. | 25,000 and up |
| Flippers, slingshots, plunger | – | Chrome Orbit's lower playfield, unchanged for a twelfth table, in barn red and cream. Plunge into the flashing lane for the skill shot and a Jack Be Little. | skill shot 30,000 |
The rules
Fill the wagon. Mind the load.
- The wagon. A ripe pumpkin, a row picked, a first pick, a maze solved, every jackpot in the hayride and the haul, the Big Max: each puts a pumpkin in the wagon. Each variety has its own weight, from a one-pound Jack Be Little to a ninety-pound Big Max. Every 300 pounds in the wagon adds 1 to the multiplier on every score, up to 4×.
- The row. Every shot fills the row a little. Fill it and the row is picked; shoot the Barn and Seven pulls the wagon on to the next one. Wait twenty-five seconds and he goes anyway.
- The crows. In most rows the crows are eating their way down the row too. Pick it first for 250,000 and a second pumpkin. If they get to the end first, one flies off with the pumpkin on top of your pile.
- The harvest moon. Shots fill the moon. Full, it lights the Lane for fifteen seconds. Make it, and for nine seconds every shot fills the row twice as far, every score counts double and every pumpkin comes in pairs.
- Tilt. Shake the cabinet too hard and two pumpkins fall off the wagon.
- The Harvest Rush. Two balls in the barn and a third start a three-ball multiball. Every shot is a jackpot, and three jackpots light a super jackpot at the Barn.
- Between balls. The camera goes out to Seven and the wagon while the bonus counts: rows picked, ripe ones, first picks, crows shooed, leaves raked, and the pumpkins and pounds in the wagon.
- The last ball. Seven heads for the barn at a run, the wagon finds the stone in the lane, and the whole load comes down. The pumpkins are real physics bodies, so no two crashes are the same.
The room
A farm pumpkin patch at the end of October.
The patch is built to look like the farm in the Carve Night trailer: vine rows full of pumpkins, straw bales and corn shocks, a split-rail fence, a red barn with a silo, autumn trees, and string lights over the lane.
Carve Night's and FIELDWORK's
- Seven is the FW-7 field robot from FIELDWORK, loaded from the game's folder with his own animations, his treads and his drone. Nothing in that folder is changed.
- The pumpkins are the eight varieties from Carve Night, built from the same shape formula the game uses: Howden, Cinderella, Lumina, Knucklehead, Jarrahdale, Sugar Pie, Jack Be Little and Big Max.
- Rosie and Rin talk Seven down the rows on the radio, typed out as they speak.
This machine's
- The wagon is modelled in Blender from code: a pressed-steel tray with a rolled lip, wooden stakes and slats, spoked wheels, the handle and a "No. 7" on the side. A detailed model is baked onto a lighter one, so the chipped paint, the rust, the dents and the wood grain are in its textures, and it does not look like plastic.
- The pile is stacked one pumpkin at a time: each new one looks for the lowest place it can rest, and the whole pile wobbles when the wagon moves.
- The farm is Blender from code too: the bales, the barn, the silo, the fence, the scarecrow and the poles. The sky, the ground and the light are drawn by the machine and move from golden hour to night.
- The trees are painted. The camera never gets near them, so each one is a picture of an autumn tree, lit from behind by the low sun, that turns to face you wherever the camera goes.
- The drone's lamp comes on as the sun goes down, so Seven can still see the wagon, and so can you.
- The backglass is a farm-stand sign with a little camera window on Seven and the wagon, live, while you play.
Under the glass
What makes it run.
- Physics
- The shared TiltLab table rig: Rapier 0.21 at 120 steps a second. The leaf heaps are Margin Aces' drag zones; the crows and the Big Max are one mover across the middle; the farm gates are the walls in front of the ramps; the leaf whirl is FIELDWORK's turntable and the gopher's hole a magnet. Rolling pumpkins and bats are blast lines that knock a ball in their way.
- The crash
- When the last ball drains, the wagon and its load move into a second Rapier world of their own. The wagon bed and Seven are pushed along by the animation, the stone stops the wheels, and every pumpkin on the pile becomes a ball with its own size and weight, free to roll.
- The wagon on its handle
- The wagon follows Seven like a trailer. The handle keeps its length from his hand, the steering turns toward the handle, and the body follows the steering, so it swings wide on the bends of the lane.
- The props
- source/blender/build_props.py builds the wagon, the pumpkins and the farm in Blender from code, bakes the detail with Cycles and exports one GLB. It runs in Blender or with Blender as a Python module.
- Testing
- A headless bot plays whole games in Node, each starting a row or two further on, to catch stuck balls in the leaves, behind the gates and in the gopher's hole. A script plays one whole day through the rules, from the front row to the weigh-in.
- Sound
- All made in code with the TiltLab sound kit: a plucked banjo and a fiddle, wooden thunks for the pumpkins landing, the wagon's creak, the crows, the gopher's squeak, a hand bell for the weigh-in and the crash. Wind and crickets are the beds, the crickets louder as it gets dark.
- Music
- Sola Nacre's The Ocean Keeps the Beat and Mara Quell's Turn the Whole Sky On, from MusicLab, a track for each row. The lamps flash on each track's measured beat.
- Controls
- A / ← and D / → (or Shift) for the flippers (the right one works both right flippers), Space to plunge, Z and / to nudge, Esc to pause. A gamepad works. On a phone, use the pads at the bottom of the screen. Drag to look round, pinch or scroll to zoom, and reset the view with the button that appears.
In the lineage
Machine 12, after THE KHUFU KEY.
PICK OF THE PATCH starts from THE KHUFU KEY: its upper table and its rules, with rows in place of chambers, a ripe pumpkin in place of the glyph and crows in place of the Consortium. From MUD TRUCK '99 it takes the table standing in a world where something is going on. From FIELDWORK it takes Seven. From STEADFAST it takes a sky that changes as you play. From Chrome Orbit it keeps the lower playfield, the sound kit and the start-up loader.
Its new idea is a score you can see. The pumpkins are the points, piled on a wagon, and the end of the game is the end of the pile.